


Privilege

by KittyViolet



Series: Kitty told me to name this series [3]
Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-16
Updated: 2017-05-16
Packaged: 2018-11-01 10:03:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10919574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Adventures, and anxieties, and demons, at New Salem Mall.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after "Immaterial Girl."

Kitty has strong feelings about shopping malls.

They go back to her time in Deerfield, before all this started. On the one hand, they’re artificial, commercial in an almost sinister sense, designed to get you to spend the money you have, or the money your parents have (and yes, her parents had money; back then she did not know quite how Carmen Pryde got it). On the other hand, they’re brightly lit, apparently safe places to try on any number of new looks: that fuzzy purple top? that pillbox hat? that black sheer sweatshirt with the off-center scoopneck? would they become her? you never know unless you try. The year before she moved to the X-Mansion she would take an algebraic geometry textbook to Deerbrook Mall and flit among the fake street scenes, park benches, Esprits and Limiteds for hours, rewarding herself with a top or a scarf or socks whenever she found an error in the book or completed a proof.

She’d do the same thing at the New Salem Mall, except that she never seems to have the time: the longest consecutive stretch of minutes that Kitty has spent on clothing this year involved a Shi’ar starship and a machine that made outfits from scratch, based on the user’s thought patterns: it would have been even more fun if somebody had taught Kitty all about fabrics and grains and textures and thicknesses first. 

Fortunately she has a friend she trusts absolutely who’s willing to come with her here, to New Salem Mall, to Esprit and North Central and Grand Canal Vintage and Privilege, although Illyana is not nearly as excited to try things on. Privilege, by the way, is the kind of store that has more than one clearance rack, and not a lot of a space between the carousels, but also a carpeted dressing room: they want you to spend a lot of time there, to like it there, but they don’t mind if you are relatively young, if you are more alert to colors than to cuts, if you’re wiling to buy things that may not last.

Kitty will take eight tops, three dresses, two pairs of leggings and a hat into the same big room behind the curtain where Ilya brings one solid off-white jacket and one pair of jeans.

It is, of course, a splendid jacket: some kind of vinyl on the outside, so that it shines in room light. It emphasizes her strong shoulders, her upper arms, and her hips—it flares at her hips, a bit. It’s got semi-shiny round buttons--- metallic, but dark; would the name for that color be platinum?—and light quilting inside; she could wear it all winter long, without having to take it off indoors. 

“Obviously it is you,” Kitty says. “I think it’s been waiting for you in here and sending out telepathic go-elsewhere messages to make sure that nobody else buys it, because that’s the only reason it could be possibly be on sale.” (Kitty envisions a set of demand curves, each with a separate plateau or peak.)

Ilya looks at herself in the dressing room’s three angled mirrors, shrugs, takes off the jacket, digs her toes into the carpet. She’s wearing a scoop-neck white tee with silver threads that stops just above her belt, to show just a hint of skin. Would the tee look even better on her were it slightly asymmetrical, revealing a bit more side? or a bit more shoulder?

Does Kitty notice these things more on her best friend now that they... do stuff they didn’t do before? now that she lets herself think about where she would like to put her own hands, and her mouth, on her best friend’s body? Doesn’t Ilya notice the same things about Kitty’s body, during a normal day, especially while they have some privacy? Does Ilya stop to look at what Kitty’s civilian clothing does for Kitty’s skin? She probably does; but Illyana doesn’t spend nearly as much time mentally redesigning outfits. Ilya puts the jacket back on, without fastening the front clasp; it swings as she turns towards the door.

That centimeter of belly, of hip... isn’t skin: it’s shining in a way that it did not shine a moment ago. Also it’s made of white metal, and Illyana is suddenly holding her soulsword.

“Oh no,” she says. “I’ll be right back.” And Illyana rushes out of the dressing room, past a few racks, and up to the top of the escalator, underneath the enormous chandelier, leaving Kitty holding a surprisingly awkward, bulky stack of tops and skirts and hats that will have to wait.

Fortunately Kitty has her own ways to get in and out of almost any space without attracting unwanted attention: she phases through the floor, runs several metres through the HVAC (yes, of course Kitty thinks in metric), then comes up in an elevator shaft so nobody sees her phase, and there’s her best friend slashing away at a couple of bat-winged demons outside the food court. 

Those demons: we’ve seen them before, though not in the mall—they seem to have come from Limbo, with the same purple plucked-chicken skin as S’ym. They’re bad fliers, but pretty good people-botherers, with bodies the size of mastiffs and talons like chefs’ knives. 

Also potential child-slicers: one of them seems to be swooping towards a couple of grade-schoolers bent over burgers and fries. Kitty sprints towards the kids, shove them both out of the way, and twist around in time to throw a plastic chair at the dumb flapping, honking, hovering demon. It won’t take the demon down, but it might work as a distraction until Illyana can get back here; she’s busy cutting the other two into thin deli slices over by the Yo! Yo! Yogurt stand.

It almost works. The demon howls, wheels, and dives at me claws first. Kitty phases easily; the demon, of course, had no idea that could happen, and bonks both its claws on the tile floor. It’s like what would happen if you stubbed all your toes at once: painful, distracting, but not disabling. The purple thing stumbles upright, flaps and flaps, and now it’s airborne again. Kitty can protect herself indefinitely, but can she protect the civilians?

She doesn’t have to. Here comes Illyana, soulsword in both hands. The soulsword can take on and take apart anything magical, anything from a mystic dimension; against non-magic entities, it’s just a lightshow. These winged things must be bad Limbo magic, because Kitty’s best friend and her glowing broadsword are literally chopping them to bits. One goes down. Two go down. Big wings sizzle as the blade cuts through them; one of them lands, like a bad joke, in front of a KFC.

Most of the kids have fled the food court—fortunately there are several entrances—but some of them are huddled behind a cart, watching the battle play out; it’s not the first to come to New Salem Mall, and Kitty would like to justify what seems to be their confidence in superheroes, or maybe just in Illyana, who must be using her crack peripheral vision, because she’s not colliding with any of the people left on the scene: she stands, she leaps, she runs the last one through.

It’s the biggest one, too. Kitty looks at the corpse of the marauding bat-dragon-demon thing as it starts to boil away (apparently they need a continuous spell to keep them material here; when the spell stops they fade away back to Limbo). It looks like a terribly drawn, mean, outsized caricature of Kitty’s own pet dragon, like the ugly predatory thing that Lockheed would never want to grow up to be.

She doesn’t, for obvious reasons, bring Lockheed to malls. What would he think, if he were here?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No shoplifting! (This is the steamy chapter, so far.)

Ilya is standing beside Kitty now, at the top of the escalator. Her armor’s still showing: just part of it, over one shoulder, but the contrast it makes with the rest of her is... pleasing, actually: shining overlapping silver metal under the mall’s fluorescent light on the left side, even brighter than her white-blond hair, and that flared vinyl jacket on the left, over jeans and tight boots. (Neither of the boots shows any armor.)

“What was that all about?” Kitty asks. “More of the same?”

“You called it,” Illyana says. “These things run in packs, and every time I leave a portal open even for half a minute longer than it takes to get a person through, every time I neglect to vanish a stepping disc the second I’m finished using it, another pack gets through. Sometimes they seem to want random destructive mischief and attacks on human beings in this dimension; sometimes it’s like my own stray memories are trying to bite me or drag me”—she shudders—“back there.”

Illyana shudders again, steadies herself, walks toward the down escalator. Kitty follows, hesitates, takes the bigger, stronger girl’s hand, and squeezes it hard. For all the inconveniences and hassles and headaches and stressballs that come with being Kitty—with being the youngest hero in the room, in every room, except when she’s the oldest; with being the former poor little rich kid who’s now not poor, little, or rich; with being intangible when she wants to be tangible, and solid when she’d rather melt into air; with being either the student, or the teacher, in absolutely every relationship of any kind that she has ever had except with Illyana—and that’s part of what’s amazing about Illyana—for all those things that keep her up at night, she’s faced nothing like what Illyana went through in the years between 8 and 13.

Ilya squeezes back. Anyone behind them on the escalator would know they felt close, but not how close, and not for how long. And what’s the answer to “how long”? Does it include the years before Limbo, when Kitty was hopelessly crushed out on Illyana’s big—her very big—brother, and Ilya herself was a little kid, fit audience though few for Kitty’s most famous of bedtime stories? Does it include the time since her return, the time they’ve considered themselves best friends? Or only the time they’ve been even more than that?

Illyana’s armor has faded away, which probably means all the magical danger has gone. “Do you want to go home?” Kitty asks. “We can just go home.”

“I do not,” Illyana says. “I want this jacket.” Which means that she’ll be sure to go pay for it. Would she consider just walking or taking the bus back to the mansion otherwise? Kitty would not contemplate shoplifting, herself. She’s pretty sure Amara shoplifts regularly, or at least that she used to do.

“Also,” Illyana continued, “there are things you want, and we have left them back at that store.”

Ten minutes later they are back among the mirrors behind the door in the dressing room at Privilege, which has surprisingly little foot traffic today: Illyana is watching, and sometimes not watching, Kitty trying a stack of tops, and sweaters, and spring weight dresses, and leggings, and T-shirts, on. (Yes, they are both slightly sweaty from fighting demons. No, they do not feel gross; it was a short fight.) 

Kitty cares very much about the size of the purple diagonal pattern on one top, and about the lightning-stripe around the ribs in another: she takes off the lightning-stripe, tries on something with three overlapping layers, all blue-black, not Goth but New Wave, zips its zippers, unzips its zippers, looks in two mirrors, sorts it into the “yes” pile. Now she’s bare except for a bra and leggings again.

Illyana distracts herself by thinking about better ways to handle a broadsword, about the right curve for the left wrist in a second-tier scarlet repulsion spell.

She also distracts herself by looking at Kitty, and then surprising her with a kiss. The youngest X-Man is wide-eyed—she’s always wide-eyed, so when she feels wide-eyed she’s very, very wide-eyed—and then decisive, responsive; it’s a long kiss, and they hold each other very close. Ilya’s hands are on Kitty’s bare shoulders; it’s like a slow dance. 

When Kitty moves gradually away from Illyana it’s not because she wants them to stop touching; it’s because she isn’t sure what Illyana wants to do next, or what’s appropriate and what’s very inappropriate and what is, as they say, so wrong it’s right, in a dressing room at Privilege in the New Salem Mall at 3 in the afternoon. (Non-mutant teen shoppers might be arriving, and might be queueing up for the dressing room, soon.)

“To be continued, I think, at our place of residence?” asks Kitty, and Illyana nods. Their fingers interlace, squeeze, separate. 

The American girl is looking into her best friend’s eyes, which aren’t quite meeting hers: they are directed slightly farther down, to Kitty’s nipples, which are very much erect under her bra. They are, Ilya thinks, waiting to be touched, and so she touches one of them, playfully, then slowly and seriously, while both girls are still standing up.

Kitty’s insides slowly fill with syrupy warmth; she’s very happy that Illyana wants to do this in the middle of the day, in bright light, in an unexpected place, but maybe this isn’t the place? Or maybe it’s so wrong it’s right? She’s surprised to discover her hand between her own legs—it’s so sweet—now they’re kissing again—Illyana’s other hand is on the back of Kitty’s thigh, while Kitty’s own right hand— and now her bra has come off and Illyana has two fingers pinching, circling, turning around her areola, putting pressure on her tender nipple--

When she comes, she comes surprisingly fast, arching backwards like a real cat, then closing her thighs around Illyana’s thigh. “That was—you are—“ 

She has, for once, managed to come without phasing entirely through the floor, although her head is now at the level of Illyana’s belly, which means she must have phased a little bit. She pokes her friend with her nose, then walks upwards, escalator-style, on the air molecules beneath the tile floor, until she’s back up to ground level and can become solid again.

Right next to her best friend, who has fallen—no, who has decided to lie down on the dressing room’s carpet, in a kind of odalisque pose. “Shhhh,” she utters, and pulls Kitty down on top of her.

And then they are grinding together without taking off any clothes; their whole torsos are almost smushed together, side to side, and then with Kitty on top of Ilya, and then with their thighs entangled. Illyana Rasputina doesn’t just want distraction, or affection: she’s also hungry, in a way that amazes Kitty but also almost scares her.

The right thing to do is almost certainly something that Kitty has just learned how to do, and something nobody else could do: she works her wrist between them and then phases only her fingers, one finger, two fingers, moving them up and down and inside her friend’s very wet underwear, becoming just substantial enough at her fingertips to make the pressure buzz, and grow, and grow.

Kitty slows down with that one hand, becomes… just slightly more solid; she knows exactly where her fingers are, and sends them deeper, keeping her arm and wrist phased through Illyana’s underwear, through her thick jeans. Back and forth, back and forth, slightly faster, with two fingers, as her friend’s thighs clench tighter around her partly insubstantial palm...

It’s a good thing the door’s locked. It’s a good thing they’ve done this before without making much sound. It’s a very good thing when Ilya’s head arcs back, and her blond locks brush the floor, and she makes what would look like a great cry of pleasure, a long vowel of satisfaction, a loud vowel, to somebody watching a film with the sound turned off, though in fact almost no sound comes out.

They separate their bodies; they sit up. “Katya,” Illyana says very quietly. She looks at the discarded clothes on a bench, the few Kitty has already selected, the several more she has yet to try on.

Illyana is clearly contemplating teleporting them back to the X-Mansion so that they can… get more done. She shakes her head instead. “I can wait,” she says.

“But not for long?” Kitty asks. “Not for long.” But Kitty is looking at herself in the mirrors again; at her thin shoulders, at her very sensitive nipples, at her still exposed breasts. She likes what she has, partly because Illyana likes what she has, partly because, well, she likes it; a good frame to dance with, to try out looks with, maneuverable in combat situations, if hardly strong. 

But she looks at her best friend’s strength, at Illyana’s body, which could be the body of an adult, the body she’s going to be able to have, and to keep, for a long time now (as long as she keeps working out).

Kitty’s different—she is, as they say about the news, developing, except that she hasn’t developed. The flat hips, the tender nipples—tenderest when Illyana touches them, now; so tender for so long—the figure between an A and a B cup… 

Kitty is looking in those mirrors again, looking at herself again, while Illyana looks at her, and she puts some clothes back on. It seems to her that she had almost the same body, fit into the same clothes, that she had in Deerfield; none of it’s changed very much since she got powers, even while other girls grew, bloomed, changed size, over years. Illyana Illyana went through what Illyana went through, which nobody should ever have to go through, and when she came back to our world she came back strong; and now she has the body she will have.

Nor does Kitty compare herself only and always to Illyana: baseline human teens, over the same months and years that Kitty has been living in Westchester Country, would probably maybe possibly go from looking totally flat to looking as curvy, as solid, as womanly, as they are going to get.

Is Kitty going to be a girl, and not a woman; a kid, and not a grownup; a student, and not a teacher, for the rest of her life? She looks at her ribs, at her bare shoulders, at her not quite flat chest with its ever-arriving, never-already-there shape, her still-padded-- only Illyana knows this-- bra... 

Is that a problem? Will it ever be?


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watch that fax.

Ilya is going to sleep for a while longer, which is fine. They woke up together, side by side, Kitty first—Illyana had chosen the more demanding workout in the Danger Room on Friday afternoon; it made sense that she’d want to sleep in, except that she didn’t, quite, want to sleep in; one minute Kitty was watching her best friend do her best Sleeping Beauty impression, and the next they were both awake, and kissing. Long, slow, we-have-all-the-time-in-the-world kissing. Kitty could feel her cheeks turning scarlet; she could, also, feel their hips pressing closer together as they turned on their sides, towards each other, in that still just slightly too narrow bed. And then Kitty’s hand, still slowly, up her friend’s hip, under the narrow cotton...

They felt whole, together, and safe, together, so safe that Illyana just drifted right back off to sleep. She would have a full afternoon; Kitty could see the stack of school books on her friend’s desk, and the small bowls of ginger and wax: a lot of fingerwork, a lot of exhausting concentration, was going into her new unit on protective spells, part of which had to be taught remotely, through letters and video conferencing and the occasional portal-to-portal communication, from the Manhattan brownstone of Stephen Strange. Between Professor X, Storm, and the available tutors in Westchester, Kitty and the New Mutants could get a lot of the curriculum appropriate for college-bound seniors, but advanced defensive sorcery required outside help. Kitty looks at Illyana’s closed eyes and imagines her dreaming of golden ellipses, of butterfly-shaped translucent shields, of arcana devoted to preservation and confidence—God knows she’d seen enough spells of other kinds.

Kitty hasn’t seen enough of her own studies lately: she’s got equations to investigate, but she’s also curious about the new gadget in one of the downstairs offices, installed for better communication with the non-superhero parts of the world. 

She’s in that office now, examining the thing from the outside, trying to guess at its circuitry, its means of operation. It is about the size of a breadbox, it was unknown a few years ago, in Kitty’s childhood (there were none in Carmen’s bank), and now it’s something you see all the time; it’s a fax machine, and the youngest X-Man wants to know exactly how it works. Can she take it apart and put it back together? She won’t disrupt it if it’s not turned on; she phases her hand inside to feel the rollers, the ink containers, the heating element, other moving parts.

YEOW, says the fax machine. SELFFRIEND TICKLES. GENERATES HEEHEE BUT PLEASE REMOVE FRIENDLYGRASP BODYPART FROM SQUARESELF PHOTOPYROTRANMISSIVE TEMPORARY EXPERIMENTAL FORM. SERIOUS RISKS RUN INVOLUNTARY TRANSFORMATION SELFFRIEND FRIENDOFDOUG ARMHAND OTHERWISE! HEEHEE PLEASE DO REMOVE HOWEVER HEEHEE

Kitty carefully, steadily, takes her forearm, hand and fingers out of Warlock.

“Why are you impersonating a fax machine?” she asks. She looks around at the old-school (it is, also, literally, an old school—the X-Mansion was a school before there were mutants to educate, before it was in the Xavier family) shelves and desks and panels, with their stained oak; behind Kitty and Warlock, on a lower shelf, sits the actual fax machine. A thick cable runs between them; Warlock has been “reading” what’s inside, in order to copy it in his own form.

AFTERPEOPLEBREAKFASTTIME GOOD TIME FOR OTHERMACHINE BECOMINGPRACTICE. SELFLEARN TO UNDERSTAND NEWMACHINE SO AS TO BECOME IMITATE IN SPYSTEALTH SITUATION, LEARN OFFICESECRETS TRANSMIT TO SELFFRIEND SAVEHUMANLIVES. SELFUSEFUL TRAIN! Warlock exclaims. Rectangular red lights on Warlock-the-fax-machine blink hopefully; they must be his eyes. The paper tray smiles.

“Good thinking,” says Kitty quietly. If Warlock can pass for a fax machine the friendly alien will be able to infiltrate malevolent offices—the Pentagon? the Hellfire Club’s front companies? Of course, he’d have to keep quiet the whole time and pretend to be a non-sentient machine; for such a chatty technarch, that might be the hardest part. Kitty herself can’t stay quiet for very long; the only way she’s stopped herself from derailing talk in a group, sometimes, has been to pull a small spiral notebook out of her purse and start taking notes.

Also not quiet: the actual fax machine. What’s spooling out of it on a Saturday at 10am? The cover page says it comes from Avengers Mansion.

Warlock’s red eyes get bigger and less square, more irregular, brighter; eyestalks the shape of improbably Erector-set constructions extend across the room, over the cable, above the fax machine, so that Warlock can see what it says. Kitty leans over the thermopaper, does a double-take, tugs, out of nervous energy, on her tan knee-length shift dress...

TO: CHARLES XAVIER AND/OR ORORO MUNROE  
FROM: HANK McCOY  
RE: KITTY DNA

_Dear Prof: we’ve been having a ball in our new basement (actually five balls at once, incl. basketball, volleyball, fancy dress ball, simultaneously—I think it has to do with last time we fought Kang but that’s the wrong superscience so don’t ask me) & you should come hang out with us again if you are not feeling too uptight BUT I’m faxing about the Kitty thing; you said Ororo and her dance teacher had both noticed that she wasn’t growing and hadn’t grown at all since her powers manifested quite a while ago and that was (a) not normal for teens to just stop growing and (b) also not normal for mutants? and she was maybe worried, and had communicated to Ororo that she was worried about it?_

__

__

_And so we took out the diffusion laser and the centrifuge and used the existing sample you sent to run, oh, just a whole ton of absolutely delightful tests. We have been chilling in the secure biolab for the best part of a Wednesday. And here’s what we, meaning, honestly, me, because I was the only one on the trapeze in the lab all afternoon, found._

Kitty’s eyes are very wide. She’s leaning over the thermopaper as if she wanted to read every serif on every character without getting her fingerprints on it.

_We know there is or has been or will be at least one totally grown-up adult Katherine who is able to have children because there’s a future Earth where that did take place, and Kitty’s consciousness has been there. But obv. we don’t want to go there. Is Kitty likely to keep growing, on this Earth, here? Should she worry about it?_

__

__

_Your no longer humble servant Hank McCoy and his passel of centrifuges and spectrometers, after working overtime, have the answers: maybe not, but maybe not. The same mutation that lets her become immaterial also has secondary effects on hormones; the good news is that she is not aging backwards, unless you have further encounters with Mojo, which ew._

_But if she’s still growing up physically at all it’s going to happen very, very slowly, and given the way the HTRN-A markers interact with psychic time travel (yes, there have been studies; I am a coauthor on all of them) it’s totally possible that however mature everything about Kitty’s judgment and cognition are at 18 and 28 and so on she is quite possibly going to look and feel like a young teen—the one in the photographs—pretty much until she’s certifiably old. And by ‘and feel’ I mean hormones; apparently if you have the mutation that gives Kitty her phasing power and you have been through a psychic time displacement as she has there are parts of puberty that are like perpetual motion machines at the macromolecular level; always going on and never permanently changing and never done._

_Is she going to be OK with that? Do you want me to send her some kind of report in molecular-bio language, which I can totally do, or is it a Big Conversation you’d want to have with the kid, maybe with Ororo involved?_

 

Is Kitty going to be OK with that?

Is Illyana?

Does it have consequences for their feelings about each other, or for Kitty’s feelings about her future? Some days—this morning, for example—Kitty has thought she’d be glad to stay in the X-Mansion, picking up new skills, occupying the attic along with Illyana, forever; but what if that’s not good for her, or for the X-Men? What if it’s not good for her best friend?

If you could choose whether to grow up, would you choose it? What if you could pick and choose the parts you wanted to keep?

Is having an adult body, and an adult life, and, let’s face it, an adult relationship to sex (whatever that means) a privilege, or an obligation, or a right, or none of the three?

Why is the news that Kitty has just read (along with Warlock, who is clicking and beeping softly) at once a reason to shiver—Kitty is shivering slightly; she wants to tell someone, maybe Illyana, maybe Storm— and a relief?


End file.
